Floyd Farland, Citizen of the Future

Floyd Farland was originally serialized as a weekly strip in
The Daily Texan (the campus newspaper of the University
of Texas at Austin) beginning the summer of 1986 and ending in the
spring of 1987. It was somewhat rewritten/redrawn for the Eclipse
publication, but the origins as a weekly strip is readily apparent
from reading the book.

Floyd Farland is Ware's first major published work. It shows a
promising artist taking his first tentative steps, but if it
wasn't for the special circumstances of the US comics industry in
1987 (the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had just become a huge
success and all companies were pushing as much black and white
crap as they could to participate in the B&W investor's
boom/bust) I doubt it would have been published.

The story is as
follows: Floyd Farland lives in a world where «a sly totalitarian
state is able to make the common man think, do, or desire
anything...» Everybody, it seems, is involved in the overthrow of
this state (including the state itself, of course) -- except Floyd
Farland. This makes him very suspect, and he is taken as an
underground leader, imprisoned, tortured, escapes, hailed as
savior, nearly killed, and arrested again.

The book reads like Orwell's 1984 filtered through
Gilliam's Brazil, with a callous, «ironic» and cynical
approach to the characters. The story has awkward shifts in mood,
severe structural problems and an ending that seems to point to
Ware simply being tired of doing the strip. Nevertheless, the
book is largely enjoyable. There are some funny jokes, and while
the story line is largely clichéd, some elements are both original
and surprising.

The art is also a mixed blessing. The use of bold black lines
together with text set in Futura gives the book a naked,
unembellished look. The refusal to draw outlines around the
figures (or use any form of cross-hatch shading) is daring, and
works beautifully when Ware is drawing people standing around or
talking to each other, which is what he does most of the time.
When things happen, though, it can be nearly impossible to tell
what's going on, but since there's not much happening, this isn't
a major obstacle.

If I were to damn the book with faint praises, I'd say the book
is far, far more interesting than most of the comics being
published today. This isn't saying much, though.

In the back of the book there's an «about the author» page
written by Ware's mother that's quite amusing, and also a «from
the author» page written by Ware. The story runs for 41 pages.

Is «Floyd Farland, Citizen of the Future» worth seeking out?
Probably not. You'd also have grave problems finding the book --
Eclipse Books, who published it, have gone out of business, and I
don't think they printed that many copies in the first place. (I
have no idea how many they did print, though.) Furthermore, it
has been reported (although I don't know the veracity of this)
that Ware is actively seeking out copies, buying them, and
destroying them. While it is understandable that he might be
embarrassed by this (literally, I think) sophomoric work, it does
show a young, promising, obviously talented artist doing his best,
which is nothing to be ashamed of.